Abstract

We investigated the effect of charged domain boundaries (CDBs) on the coercive voltage (Vc) in polycrystalline Pb(Zr0.25Ti0.75)O3(PZT)thin films using angle-resolved piezoresponse force microscopy (AR-PFM). By using the AR-PFM technique, we could observe the detailed domain structure with various degrees of CDBs including neutral domain boundaries in the PZTthin films. We found that the Vc increases at CDBs induced by polarization discontinuities. We attribute the change in Vc to the built-in field created by uncompensated polarization charges at the CDBs in the PZTthin films.

Received 30 May 2011Accepted 07 September 2011Published online 07 October 2011

Acknowledgments:

This research was supported by the Nano R&D Program (No. 2010-0019123), Basic Science Research Program (No. 314-2008-1-D00172), Conversion Research Center Program (No. 2011K000674), and Mid-career Researcher Program (No. 2010-0015063) through the National Research Foundation (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST), New & Renewable Energy of the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) grant funded by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, Republic of Korea (No. 20103020060010). Work at Argonne National Laboratory (S.H., design of experiments, data analysis, and writing of manuscript) was supported by UChicago Argonne, a U.S. DOE Office of Science Laboratory, operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. J.H. acknowledges a start-up fund supported by Chung-Ang University.